1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a completely automated method for converting a polygonal representation to a compact, high-quality surface representation using Bezier patches.
2. Description of the Related Art
There is a growing interest in the graphics, vision, and manufacturing communities to be able to digitize the shape and external appearance of objects for the purpose of transmission, display, and numerically controlled fabrication. This would have applications in product design, fast prototyping, reverse engineering, and digitizing shapes for the visual simulation, animation, and entertainment industries. Current advancement in laser range scanners now offers a promising methodology for fully-automated model acquisition of arbitrary objects. Several million points scanned on an arbitrary object can be converted easily into an irregular mesh of polygons. These polygons have to then be converted into a parametric surface representation, which is a more compact and manipulable form. This last step is referred to as the problem of surface reconstruction, and has been noted by CAD/CAGD as one of the top ten problems to be solved. Prior art on surface reconstruction method have generally been constrained by the enforced assumption that objects be well-behaved in the sense that they have no creases or sharp edges. Also, prior art surface representation construction methods are generally only semi-automated, i.e., require user intervention. Therefore, an improved system and method is desired for converting a polygonal representation to a compact, high quality surface representation using Bezier patches.